Robin Wright and Olivia Cooke star in Prime Video’s new psychological thriller The Girlfriend, based on Michelle Frances’s mystery novel of the same name. The six-episode series is a twisty ride, following Laura Sanderson (Wright), a gallery owner with a seemingly charmed life—a gorgeous London home, a loving husband, a son she adores—that begins to unravel when her son, Daniel (Laurie Davidson), brings home a new girlfriend, Cherry Laine (Cooke).
The Girlfriend frequently alternates between Laura’s and Cherry’s perspectives—meaning, the audience gets to see how each one perceives their interactions with the other. Is Cherry a scheming gold-digger, as Laura suspects? Is Laura paranoid and overly protective of her only son? The changing POVs keep you wondering all the way through.
Tensions between Laura and Cherry ratchet up as her romance with Daniel becomes serious…and we know they lead to violence. The show’s opening minutes depict a confrontation at the Sanderson home—voices shouting, blood on the floor, something (or someone) falling into a swimming pool. But what exactly happens, and to whom? That mystery isn’t revealed until the final episode, but even then, there’s one last surprise in store. Read on as we break down all of The Girlfriend’s twists and turns.
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Why does Laura dislike Cherry so much in ‘The Girlfriend?’
Apart from being generally (and, one could argue, obsessively) overprotective of her adult son, Laura takes an immediate dislike to Cherry from the moment she walks into the Sanderson home. Some of it comes down to class differences and the smaller lies she catches Cherry in, like not attending the tony private school she claimed to, or flying a budget airline when Daniel gave her money to fly business class. However, what especially raises her alarm is when she discovers that Cherry stole one of her bracelets and later overhears a heated argument between her and her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas (Leo Suter). This prompts Cherry to drive a wedge between mother and son…or, from Cherry’s POV, Laura trying to keep her and Daniel apart.
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How do Laura and Cherry attempt to sabotage each other throughout ‘The Girlfriend?’
Things were already not great between the two when Daniel gets seriously injured in a climbing accident—but when the circumstances look particularly dire, Laura decides in the moment to tell Cherry he died, leaving her bereft. Daniel, meanwhile, pulls through but is heartbroken, thinking Cherry left him while he was hospitalized. Laura pushes things even further by forcing Cherry to move out of the flat she and Daniel shared, then stealing her Instagram password and posting a message that gets her fired from her job.
When she discovers that Daniel is, in fact, alive, she’s furious and out for revenge. Exposing Laura’s lie to her husband, Howard (Waleed Zuaiter), and Daniel does plenty of damage on its own, but Cherry also goes to the gallery and confronts her there, smashing a champagne glass into her own head to make it look like Laura attacked her. She then breaks into the gallery after hours to deface the paintings on the walls, done by Laura’s secret lover. That’s what gets Laura to have Cherry arrested, which drives Daniel even further away.
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What did Cherry do to her father in ‘The Girlfriend?’
Whether it’s sabotaging her ex-boyfriend’s wedding or her mother’s allusions to things she’s done in the past, it’s clear that Cherry has a history of doing whatever she feels is necessary to get what she wants or defend herself when she’s wronged. Cherry’s father, John (Simon Meacock), found this out firsthand.
After Laura tracks him down at a long-term care facility—a noteworthy discovery in itself, because Cherry claimed he had died—she learns he was permanently injured after suffering a 20-foot fall on a construction job. John can’t speak, but his agitation at hearing Cherry’s name sets off more alarm bells, leading Laura to speak to Cherry’s mother, Tracey (Karen Henthorn), mother to mother. Tracey doesn’t outright confirm that Cherry pushed him, but her tone makes it clear that she did, because he’d left them saddled with debt, and she wanted to make him come back.
Both women concede they’ll do whatever it takes to protect their children: It’s why Laura is there trying to get evidence to convince Daniel to break up with Cherry, and why Tracey continues to cover for Cherry. Tracey warns that if Cherry finds out what Laura is up to, there will be consequences, because when Cherry gets her sights on something, she’ll do anything to get it.
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Who dies at the end of ‘The Girlfriend?’
In the sixth and final episode, the issues between Laura, Daniel, and Cherry reach a breaking point after Laura gets Cherry arrested at the couple’s engagement party for the damage she did to Laura’s gallery. Cherry’s mother, Tracey (Karen Henthorn), lies to the police to confirm her alibi, and then warns Cherry that Laura knows what happened to her father and is going to tell Daniel everything.
Daniel, meanwhile, heads home to confront his mother, who slips pills into his drink to keep him from leaving—and to play him a recording of the conversation she had with Cherry’s mother. Before she can, though, Cherry gets to the house, leading to the confrontation previewed in the series premiere. Laura grabs a knife and tells Cherry that she’s driven her to this by destroying her family. During the melee, Laura’s phone gets knocked away, Cherry slashes her hand in an attempt to get the knife away, and Laura tackles Cherry into the pool, where they both try to drown the other.
That’s when Daniel jumps in and pulls Laura off of Cherry in an attempt to break up the fight, but because he’s been drugged, he doesn’t realize he’s still holding his mother under the water. While Cherry does tell him to stop, it’s too late. Laura dies during what would be her final attempt to protect her son.
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What happens at the end of ‘The Girlfriend?’
Laura’s death might have been an accident, but it came as a result of her being hell-bent on exposing Cherry and showing Daniel she wasn’t who she claimed to be. That ruthless pursuit comes back around one last time in a flash-forward to a few months later, while Daniel and Cherry are in happily wedded bliss—enjoying a sunny day with Howard in the garden, and Cherry is pregnant.
When Daniel goes inside to fix some drinks, he sees the family cat trying to get something out from under a side table. He pulls out Laura’s phone, which got knocked away during that deadly fight. He then finds one final message Laura made, saying she went to see Cherry’s mother to find out the truth, because she loves him. He then hears the recorded audio from that conversation, where her mother warns Laura that when Cherry wants something, nothing will stand in the way of her getting it. Her father learned that the hard way, as did kids at school who took her toys, and the boy who stood her up at the dance. She says to tell Daniel not to be fooled by the good times, because “soon she’ll want something that you’re not prepared to give, and then she’ll find a way to get rid of you.”
As a horrified Daniel takes all this in, he looks out and sees Cherry smiling at him from the garden—realizing all at once that his mother was right, and now it’s too late.
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